The Chinese cultural revolution is happening right now in America.
Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
11–20 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#12┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) The mainstream media is often more factual and less biased than alternative media. The modern web is superior by almost any objective measure, including quality of content, to the web of the 90s. Yes, this even includes content on services and social media. RMS got what he deserved. Significant whitespace is just a slightly messier form of brackets using non-printing characters. The elegance is an illus…
My dude! I'm feeling these items. Especially the white space. I've used coffeescript so I totally get it.
As for RMS from what I just looked up it seems he was making one of those computer scientist arguments like "all the aliens in the room are green" (because there are zero aliens in the room) type of no true scotsman arguments about an issue way too soon.
Again with LISP -- people can't get the syntax so they assume it can't be got.
(f u c k (t h a) (h a t e r s))Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#13I have many, but perhaps too many so I will not write it on here right now. When I think of something, then I will write it somewhere, and then it can be read (I hope).
Go on go on give us your top two. Speak to the heart.
Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fully disagree with dressing up at work as being important. I fully agree that many of our problems at work stem from folks trying to prove that they are competent/best at something they are largely ignorant at. Some of these people dress up professionally to help hide their lack of effectiveness. Dressing up for work is value signalling. "oh, a blazer? They are important." When it comes to client interactions, dep…
Bro I appreciate your reply and I want to remind you this is a wildly unpopular opinions thread so I'd encourage you to try to look at things from a different angle than playing the "I disagree" card which carries no merit here whatsoever. As a hint I'd like to convey that the blazer is actually a dress down apparel compared to the outfits it replaced and the suit is designed as the ultimate comfort and convenience g…
> if you can't feel comfortable in a suit and assume therefore it's impossible to for anyone to be comfortable in one,
I don't think you can't be comfortable, I just think they're less comfortable. No one spends a lazy Sunday afternoon on the couch watching TV while wearing a suit, if they were more comfortable than other clothes this would be common. Either way your solution of getting better suits or a tailor is an unnecessary expense I can do without.
As far as signalling goes it generally means the opposite of it's intention to me, if I see someone in a suite I'm more likely to think used car salesman, mormon or boss. I'm immediately much more skeptical and defensive because they'll want to sell me something or control me.
Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#15Seemingly unpopular opinion (with a lens of Go programming): Don't mock dependencies. It is brittle. Stub/fake with dependency injection. It is unimportant that a function was called N times with arguments foo and bar. What is important is that unit tests validate that units output what they should output (success and error cases) and that integration tests ensure things work together.
Hmm yea I can dig that. Next time it comes up I'll mention sethhammons told me to do it.
Actually it's good because if you find yourself stubbing too much you may be hiding complexity in your code.
Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#16Seemingly unpopular opinion (with a lens of Go programming): Don't mock dependencies. It is brittle. Stub/fake with dependency injection. It is unimportant that a function was called N times with arguments foo and bar. What is important is that unit tests validate that units output what they should output (success and error cases) and that integration tests ensure things work together.
By the way don't take my words in the other reply to heart bro. Nobody has ever worked in a dress up environment but everyone is convinced it's not for them but I've seen it firsthand and it's way better and different.
It's like when we emphasize the work over anything it's laying the foundation for toxic behaviours whereas then we emphasize the attitude that goes into the work the whole culture changes.
Most people will probably never experience it in their whole lives.. But they'll go to their deaths in uncomfortable outfits, yuck.
Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bro I appreciate your reply and I want to remind you this is a wildly unpopular opinions thread so I'd encourage you to try to look at things from a different angle than playing the "I disagree" card which carries no merit here whatsoever. As a hint I'd like to convey that the blazer is actually a dress down apparel compared to the outfits it replaced and the suit is designed as the ultimate comfort and convenience g…
> if you can't feel comfortable in a suit and assume therefore it's impossible to for anyone to be comfortable in one, I don't think you can't be comfortable, I just think they're less comfortable. No one spends a lazy Sunday afternoon on the couch watching TV while wearing a suit, if they were more comfortable than other clothes this would be common. Either way your solution of getting better suits or a tailor is an…
There are advantages for dressing up but you'll never understand them by taking the majority view.
Nobody cares what anyone wears at home we're talking comfort at work.
And again, a suit is ultimately a dress down garment requiring less care to put on than a track suit.
In all this discourse nobody ever bothered to ask what dressing is even defined as and we're supposed to call ourselves software engineers.
Another hint: wearing swag is not equivalent to dressing up.
Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#18- Public school and forcing kids to go to school is incredibly harmful to children, parents, families, and society. Forcing children to go to school is completely unnecessary. - Mutual credit is a superior monetary system to our current one in every way: An elastic money supply, no bank runs, access to credit for everyone, no inflation, decentralized with no central bank, no moral hazard from seigniorage. - Advertisi…
Wow! 100% agree on public schooling, I've witnessed it firsthand here during the pandemic. The kids were way better off without it. I'm feeling your other points too. It's funny how wrong we can be about such fundamental issues.
In case you have not yet encountered John Taylor Gatto's 7 lessons:
http://www.swaraj.org/multiversity/gatto_7lesson.htm
Also, the "famous" TED talk on educational paradigms that you may have seen or at least heard referenced
https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_educatio...
Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#19How we dress at work makes way more of a difference than we understand. The main reason startup culture sucks people up and spits out their bones is because we've taken the worst parts of corporacy and left all the best ones to rot. If a manager doesn't understand the importance of dressing up at least a few days a week he doesn't deserve the responsibility and most of the problems in this corporate world are down to…
Spoken as a software professional and computer scientist.
Human beings rely on signals to communicate efficiently, especially in larger groups.
In the absence of well defined signals people will use what they have on hand and the results will be arbitrary at best and unhelpful in all likelihood due to propensity for misinterpretation and misrepresentation, especially since they may rely on inegalitarian mechanisms like gender or hair style or age or other intrinsic characteristics which may be gamed or are inaccessible to all.
By dismissing corporate culture so egregiously we have also done away with most established signalling mechanisms without offering any new substitutes.
The definition of dressing up in this context is in reference to establishing and manifesting visible and unambiguous signalling cues for such things as rank, status, team membership, privilege or clearance and other relevant metrics.
Since we're so sensitive to traditional methods it's difficult to convince anyone to put on a shirt and tie and quit acting like children but nobody has offered any better alternative than a printed T which in my professional experience and opinion is an all-too-naive solution that fails the military grade requirements after which we've modelled our private corporations.
Imagine you're a new member on a team looking around the floor for someone with an admin override. You need to ask six people before you get referred to Joe who has the keys to production. If Joe had a stripe on his jacket you'd be able to tell right away.
Re: Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
#20- There may not be a successful vaccine for COVID-19
- COVID-19 is just a dress rehearsal for something even more deadly.
- Since there is no apex predator for humans, viruses will likely rise to become the leading cause of death
- Modern society is, by definition, carbon positive
- The one time that society allowed young people to explore their interests, to not work (the 60s), the establishment was so scared at the revolution they never wanted that freedom to ever be available again
- Universal healthcare in the US would cause massive economic shock due to the unemployment
- Affordable college education would also cause massive economic shock with unemployment as this would mean removal of government backing for student loans
- Racism is a cultural disease sort of like cancer that has many forms, mild and severe. It is individual and cannot be cured.
- Those who lack money problems always have problems. Humans need drama in their lives to feel alive.
- The attention economy that Facebook started is destroying normal human behavior year by year
- To be a producer in the new visual economy (IG), it helps to be conventionally attractive. But that if not enough, you also have to demonstrate that you are not perfect, whether fake or human
- Political correctness and its evil twin Virtue Signaling are dividing all of us, perhaps on purpose
- Everything is faked or polished to be better than it really is at some level. Technology has been good enough to do it for a while to do it offline. Lookup Melodyne for singing. Now technology is getting to the point where it can do it live
- We may not make it past the Great Filter
- Smartphones are actually dumb phones because they make us dumb
- Time is everyone's most precious resource, yet we give it away sometimes like it were free "Do you have a minute?"
- Using headphones in an office to concentrate is training your brain to require headphones to concentrate
- Caffeine is the most successful drug
- Capitalism is the only economic model that works because it gives people something to aspire towards
- You cannot have capitalism without personal debt.
- Capitalism is unsustainable as you cannot expect to grow X percent a year and not eventually run out of Y.
- The Pareto Principle can be applied to anything. For example, how many people in a company actually do useful work (20% do 80%)
- Education is the most powerful force
- Sex doesn’t just sell. Sex is everything.
- Happiness is biologically meant to be fleeting. Otherwise we would eat once, have sex once... and then die.
- Companies spend large sums of money to create controlled, temperature controlled environments to make people focus on work called offices
- Some people think they are wealthy. They are not. You are only wealthy if you can maintain your preferred lifestyle without having to work.
- Monogamy is a cultural construct
- Without biological or technological adaptation to combat radiation in space, long-term space travel is impossible